Katlian
2010-04-23 23:41:25
With the sinking of the Northern Belle this week, I thought I should pass on an overlooked safety device that most boat have and fail to hook up.
Most recent radio models have a large red button labelled "distress". If you hook your GPS signal to your radio, this button wil transmit your position and a distress signal digitally over the VHF to the USCG. They will have your position in a matter of seconds. I believe that standard time to resolve a position from an Epirb is nine minutes.
I have begun calling my fishing partners and demand that they hook the two wires together. It add seconds, when they really count. I would like to be done going to funerals for a while.
If anyone wants further details on how to hook multiple devices to a single GPS source, I would be glad to share.
slr
Salty
2010-04-25 07:06:19
Katlian,
You are going postal with all your good works. I will be hooking my digital radio up to my GPS the first week in May. Used to have it set up that way but got lazy after some rewiring and didn't hook it back up. Thanks for the reminder.
It would have really helped years ago if one of my partners had hooked his up. He called us saying he had run aground in the fog somewhere between Malmesbury and Pt. Ellis but he wasn't sure where he was. If he had wired in his radio, which had this feature, he could have activated it and we would have been able to find him much quicker. His boat ended up a total loss.